1 This publication presents statistics on finance commitments made by significant lenders for the purposes of secured housing finance for owner occupation, other personal finance, commercial finance and lease finance.

2 Secured housing finance for owner occupation is secured finance to individuals for the purchase or construction of dwellings for owner occupation, and for alterations and additions to existing owner occupied dwellings. Refinancing involving a change of lender is also included, while refinancing with the same lender is excluded from all estimates.

3 Personal finance, other than secured housing finance for owner occupation, is finance provided to individuals for their personal, non-business, use. Both fixed loans and revolving credit finance are included.

4 Commercial finance is finance provided to individuals and corporations for business or investment purposes, including for the construction or purchase of dwellings for rental or resale. Fixed loans, revolving credit and commercial hire purchase are included.

5 Lease finance includes finance leases and excludes operating and leverage leases. Operating lease finance statistics are provided separately as spreadsheets on the Downloads tab of this issue.

SCOPE

6 Finance commitments made by the following types of lenders are included:

7 Until the statistics in this publication were derived from returns submitted to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) (see paragraph 10), the statistics covered all bank commitments, and all commitments for secured housing finance for owner occupation made by permanent building societies. Of the remaining commitments, the largest lenders for each of secured housing finance for owner occupation, other personal finance, commercial finance and lease finance were covered, so that when calculated separately for each of the four broad categories of purpose finance, at least 95% of Australia-wide finance commitments and at least 90% of each state's finance commitments were covered. While many lenders other than banks were not covered, at least 70% coverage was maintained for all published lender types (including the Other Lenders series and Other Lessors series).

8 When APRA commenced the collection, lending commitments by Non-Banks with total assets of $50 million or more were covered. All banks' lending commitments were covered.

9 From January 2014 a monthly reporting threshold was introduced for Non-Banks to provide 95 per cent asset coverage of the non-bank sector. Non-banks with assets below the $200m asset threshold ceased reporting from January 2014 while other Non-Banks with assets above the threshold started reporting to APRA from January 2014. The lending commitments of those which started reporting in January 2014 were excluded from the January 2014 to January 2015 published statistics pending assessment of seasonal impacts of those non-banks' commitments on seasonally adjusted and trend series estimates. Issues of this publication from February 2015 include finance commitments from January 2014 reported by Non-Banks above the reporting threshold. A trend break in January 2014 was added to the Lease Finance series published in Tables 1 and 27, due to this change in coverage.

SOURCES

10 For banks, credit cooperatives, building societies and RFCs, the statistics in this publication are currently derived from returns submitted to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA). The Financial Sector (Collection of Data) Act 2001 facilitates the collection of statistical data from the financial sector, with APRA established as the central point for collection of both prudential and statistical data. In October 2001, APRA implemented new reporting forms for building societies and credit cooperatives. New reporting forms were implemented for banks in March 2002, and for RFCs in March 2003. APRA commenced collecting loan commitments data from banks, credit cooperatives and building societies in July 2002, and from RFCs in March 2003.

11 Secured housing finance commitments for owner occupied housing from banks, building societies and credit cooperatives are derived from ARF 392.0 Housing Finance form collected by APRA. Personal finance commitments from these lenders are sourced from the ARF 394.0 Personal Finance form. Commercial finance commitments from these lenders are sourced from the ARF 391.0 Commercial Finance form and from the ARF 394.0 Personal Finance form for fixed loans for personal investment purposes. Lease finance commitments are sourced from the ARF 393.0 Lease Finance form.

14 All other institutions, including securitisation vehicles, are collected directly by the ABS.

REVISIONS

15 Revisions to previously published statistics are included in the publication as they occur.

16 Changes in the classification of lenders (e.g. the conversion of a permanent building society to a bank) are reflected in the Lender series from the month of the change. Data for earlier periods for such lenders are not reclassified. Details of the establishment of new banks are recorded in the 'Series breaks' tabs of Statistical Table B2 on the Reserve Bank of Australia's website: RBA Statistical Tables.

SEASONAL ADJUSTMENT

17 Seasonal adjustment is a means of removing the estimated effects of normal seasonal variation and ‘trading day effects’. A ‘trading day effect’ reflects the varying amounts of activity on different days of the week and the different number of days of the week in any month (i.e. the number of Sundays, Mondays, etc.). This effect may be partly caused by the reporting practices of the lenders. Adjustment is also made for Easter which may affect the March and April estimates differently. Trading day effects are removed from the original estimates prior to the seasonal adjustment process. Seasonal adjustment does not remove the effect of irregular or non-seasonal influences (e.g. a change in interest rates) from the seasonally adjusted series.

18 Estimation of seasonal adjustment and trading day factors that reflect the full effect of recent developments is not possible until a sufficient number of years of data have been collected. When changes are occurring in the seasonal patterns, larger revisions to the seasonally adjusted series can be expected at the time of the biennial (once every two years) seasonal reanalysis. Accordingly, the trend estimate data provide a more reliable indicator of underlying movement in housing finance commitments. (See paragraphs 21 and 22 for further information on trend estimates).

19 The lending finance series uses a concurrent seasonal adjustment methodology to derive the seasonal adjustment factors. This means that original estimates available at the current reference month are used to estimate seasonal factors for the current and previous months. As a result of this methodology, the seasonally adjusted and trend estimates for earlier periods can be revised each month. However, in most instances, the only noticeable revisions will be to the previous month and the same month a year ago.

20 Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) modelling can improve the revision properties of the seasonally adjusted and trend estimates. ARIMA modelling relies on the characteristics of the series being analysed to project future period data. The projected values are temporary, intermediate values, that are only used internally to improve the estimation of the seasonal factors. The projected data do not affect the original estimates and are discarded at the end of the seasonal adjustment process. The lending finance collections use an individual ARIMA model for the majority of the series in this publication. The concurrent seasonal adjustment approach re-estimates seasonal factors each month with the receipt of each new observation. The parameters used for seasonal adjustment are routinely reviewed every 12 to 24 months to ensure the quality of the seasonal factors. The last reanalysis occurred in February 2017 for the January 2017 issue. For more information on ARIMA modelling seeFeature article: Use of ARIMA modelling to reduce revisions in the October 2004 issue of Australian Economic Indicators (cat. no. 1350.0).

TREND ESTIMATES

21 Smoothing seasonally adjusted series reduces the impact of the irregular component of the seasonally adjusted series and creates trend estimates. These trend estimates are derived by applying a 13 term Henderson-weighted moving average to all but the last six months of the respective seasonally adjusted series. Trend series are created for the last six months by applying surrogates of the Henderson moving average to the seasonally adjusted series. For further information, refer to Information Paper: A Guide to Interpreting Time Series - Monitoring Trends (cat. no. 1349.0).

22 While the smoothing technique described in paragraph 21 enables trend estimates to be produced for the latest few months, it does result in revisions to the trend estimates as new data become available. Generally, revisions become smaller over time and, after three months, usually have a negligible impact on the series. Changes in the original data and re-estimation of seasonal factors may also lead to revisions to the trend.

EFFECTS OF ROUNDING

23 Where figures have been rounded, discrepancies may occur between sums of the component items and totals. Published changes in dollar value and percentage terms are calculated using unrounded data and may differ slightly from, but are more accurate than, changes calculated from the rounded data presented in this publication.

ABS DATA AVAILABLE ON REQUEST

24 Estimates for months prior to those shown in this publication and more detailed series are available in spreadsheet format from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) website. For more information, contact the ABS National Information and Referral Service on 1300 135 070.

26 In addition, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) produces the Bulletin, the tables of which are available on the RBA website http://www.rba.gov.au. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) also publishes a range of finance statistics on its website http://www.apra.gov.au.

27 Current publications and other products released by the ABS are available from the Statistics View. The ABS also issues a daily Release Advice on the ABS website http://www.abs.gov.au which details products to be released in the week ahead.